Dems on Flawed End of Obama Wire tapping Scandal | Mar 24, 2017

Dems Claim Trump Team Not Wiretapped While Wiretapped

| PJ Media

“On January 20, the New York Timespublished a story on wiretapping of Trump insiders. In the print version, the headline was “Wiretapped Data Used in Inquiry of Trump Aides,” although you’re going to have to squint to read the acknowledgment of the print headline at the bottom of the page.

Still, if you look through the actual article, you’ll find this paragraph:

The F.B.I. is leading the investigations, aided by the National Security Agency, the C.I.A. and the Treasury Department’s financial crimes unit. The investigators have accelerated their efforts in recent weeks but have found no conclusive evidence of wrongdoing, the officials said. One official said intelligence reports based on some of the wiretapped communications had been provided to the White House.

I’ve written about this before here and here, and I won’t go through the whole argument again as I’m not paid by the word, but the really inescapable conclusion was that either the New York Times reporting was false, or Trump was justified. The real question was identifying who in the Obama administration (or in the upper-level civil service staff) had been responsible for leaking information that identified a “US Person” — and would they be prosecuted for what appear to be felonious violations of 18USC793 and 50USC1801.

This strikes me as silly and disingenuous: it’s the same old “well, it wasn’t really a wiretap and it wasn’t really a wiretap of Trump” defense.

Now, after a lot of talk during hearings on Monday that no one saw evidence that Trump had been wiretapped, today Devin Nunes announced (quoting from his press release):

As a commenter at Instapundit pointed out, this is starting to look like the old Washington tradition, the “modified limited hangout.”

So, this is getting even more interesting now. It appears now that a number of Trump insiders were intercepted, and no, I’m not buying the argument that Trump saying “wiretapped” was wrong, especially since that’s exactly what was reported.

And it appears now that people trying to maintain that Trump was “lying” about being wiretapped are being driven to the interesting defense that it was a lie because the U.S. wasn’t actually wiretapping Trump people when the U.S. was wiretapping Trump people.

Which is, at least, good for a laugh.

In the meantime, though, I think Colonel Mustard should lawyer up: the bobbies are closing in.”

News on this topic is being updated as I write but here’s how I see it.

There were illegally obtained intercepts of Trump communications (call them wiretaps, or intercepts, or whatever). They show Trump did nothing wrong but they can be used to continue to push the narrative ‘Trump was involved with the Russians to hack the election’ and keep the Trump administration mired in a haze of innuendos and suspicion thereby damaging his administration.

But they have a problem.

They can’t reveal their information because people will ask the obvious questions, ‘Who gave you this information? Who obtained it? How was it obtained?’

The Democrats and enemies of Trump are in a bind.

If they release what they have they will have to explain who gave them the intel and give a detailed account of how it was obtained.

That’s why you have Come[d]y saying, ‘we have information but I can’t tell you what it is’.

If they release the intel their game is up because they will have to reveal the sources and methods.

But having already admitted they have the intel but they aren’t going to release it because the investigation is ongoing only makes things worse for them.

Democrats are screaming to release the evidence and wondering why Comey isn’t releasing the intel that will take Trump down.

Which leads to this:

If they release what they have the ‘Deep State’ (Obama White House staff) players will be exposed.